/m/dugout

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I don't normally use players without MLB experience on Birthday Teams unless it's glaringly obvious that they're superior to the other options. Omar Linares is obviously the best third baseman ever born on October 23, regardless of Cuba's emigration policy.

Seventeen pitchers have thrown two or more shutouts in the postseason, all but maybe three of them well-known names to most long-time baseball fans.

Of these,

1. Who is the only one to throw more than two in a single postseason?
2. Who is the only one to throw shutouts in more than two different postseasons?
3. Five threw at least two shutouts in a single series; one of whom is the answer to No. 1 above. Who are the other four? (Sox fans may know one fairly obscure one, the next most-obscure one is a pretty well-known post-WWII pitcher, and the others are in the HoF).
4. Only three had shutouts in the ALCS---all for the same team. Which team, and who are the three pitchers?
5. Only one has a shutout in a DS, a CS, and a WS. Who is it?
6. Three had an 8-year gap between postseason shutouts. Who are they?

Bench 3B would be Jim Presley, who did some things well: Hit home runs, make outs, commit errors, prevent Edgar Martinez from playing Major League Baseball. Lena Blackburne was a third baseman as well, and I imagine Kaz Matsui could have been adequate there had he been asked.

Whitey Ford (1960), Bill Dinneen (1903), and Lew Burdette (1957) are answers to #3. Babe Ruth, surprisingly, isn't, even though he held the record for consecutive scoreless WS innings for a long time. Ford and Dinneen did it against the Pirates, the only team to have been shut out in a postseason series more than once on more than one occasion.

That's two of the three (Palmer and McNally); and while those three were contemporaries (Palmer, Cuellar, McNally), I meant that the three answers were more or less contemporaries with Hunter, Blue and Stewart.

Before Baseball Rubbing Mud, baseballs were rubbed in a mixture of water and infield dirt, but this method usually discolored the ball's leather surface.[1]Other alternatives at the time were tobacco juice, shoe polish, and dirt from under stadium bleachers. They were able to successfully take off the sheenfrom baseballs, but at the same time, they also damaged and scratched a ball's leather.[2] While Lena Blackburne was a third-base coach for the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team, an umpire complained to him about the method used at the time, prompting Blackburne to set out in search of better mud to use to rub against baseballs in 1938. Later that decade, Blackburne discovered the rubbing mud's location (said to be 'near' Palmyra, New Jersey) and founded the company that he used to sell it.[3] According to the company, the entire American League used the mud soon after its discovery, and by the 1950s, it was in use by every major league team, along with some minor league and college teams.